The Service Employees International Union is now
the largest union in the U.S. labor movement. It is in many ways a success
story – on of the few unions that has grown despite one of the most
union-hostile administrations in recent history. But inside SEIU, a growing
debate questions the price paid for that growth, and debate is growing
over how much to concede to employers in return for greater ability to
organize new workers.

This is a very important debate. The same issues
exist and are hotly discussed in almost every union. Progressive organizations
outside of labor, and people who want a political change in direction
for the country, have a stake in the outcome of this debate as well. If
unions can't organize workers much faster than they have in the past,
they will become politically irrelevant. A weakened labor movement will
make it more difficult for progressive candidates to win elections, to
achieve new laws raising living standards and protecting civil rights,
and to guarantee the jobs and income that are the bedrock of healthy communities.

Unions are also being forced, however, into concessions
on the very standards that make workers want to join them. This dilemma
affects every union. For that reason, across the labor movement workers
and activists are watching closely as the debate within SEIU unfolds.
Increasingly, they are participating in the debate themselves. It’s
outcome will have an impact as great as the debates within the Democratic
Party over the war.

The conflict begins in CaliforniaIn mid 2007, nursing home and hospital
workers held a one-day convention at the Oakland Marriott hotel. At its
high point, hundreds of members of United Healthcare Workers West broke
into cheers, as leaders of their union described their program to raise
the wages of nursing home workers to the higher standard in hospitals.

The low standard in nursing homes hits hardest
at women of color and immigrants. Closing the standards gap would change
the lives of tens of thousands of working men and women, giving nursing
home members a strong reason to help bring the rest of their industry
into the union.

Less than a year later, however, UHW members were
instead organizing rallies against what they saw as a threatened trusteeship
of their local union. Today a much larger debate overshadows that nursing
home campaign and its ambitious goals. But the idea of raising the nursing
home standard, and what it might take to accomplish it, highlights many
of the central questions in that larger debate.

The transformation of the battle between UHW and
healthcare corporations into a fight between the local and its international
union is deeply disturbing to activists around the country. This is a
critical moment for healthcare workers. For the first time in U.S. history,
unions have gained the strength to organize the rest of the hospital,
and even the nursing home industries. That could create the basis for
enormous change, transforming the jobs and income of dietary workers and
bed changers in much the same way that the CIO and the San Francisco General
Strike turned longshoremen from the day laborers of the waterfront into
some of the country’s highest-paid blue-collar workers.

The stakes are very high for everyone. An organized
healthcare industry in alliance with consumers could create the strength
to win a single-payer health system benefiting every person in this country.

Many feel that a labor movement divided by bitter
internal warfare, therefore, is a gift to employers. Fratricidal struggle
could weaken the unity and solidarity needed to achieve these critical
goals. Mike Garcia, president of one of the country’s largest janitors’
unions, SEIU Local 1877, feels that, “there are some issues that
need to be discussed and talked about, but it shouldn’t happen in
public because it harms workers and our strategy to organize. These issues
could easily have been discussed, and were being discussed, internally.”

So is this discussion worth the risk? Is it even
avoidable?

Why the debate has ramifications for unions beyond SEIU

Debate in labor is difficult. As Garcia points out, organizers are trained
to believe that open discussion of problems gives ammunition to employers.
It’s also hard for organizers to be critical if your job is on the
line, or if speaking out leads to isolation. Members feel debate can jeopardize
the wages and benefits they already have, and leaders often see it as
a source of upheaval that can lead to lost elections and positions.

The U.S. labor movement has a harder time with
internal disagreement than our international counterparts. The difficulty
in the U.S. has its roots in the cold war, “which shut down debate
in organized labor,” according to Bill Fletcher, former education
director for the AFL-CIO. “It crippled us by restricting our ability
to think outside the narrow parameters of wages, hours and working conditions,
and isolating those who’d fought hardest for issues like peace and
civil rights.” That broken tradition, and its legacy of fear, left
the labor movement without much to guide a free process of internal discussion.

But it’s not the fight between one local
union and its international that needs debate so much as the questions
it has pushed forward. Mike Casey, president of UNITE HERE Local 2 wrote
a letter in the early stages of this conflict that posed several of them:

- Can we organize large numbers of workers without
lowering long fought-for union standards?

- How do we marshal our resources in a way that
focuses our fights without turning our back on other struggles?

- Can we establish criteria that will help us prioritize
organizing initiatives so that our resources are best put to use?

- How do we balance the immediate needs and aspirations
of our members with the imperative of directing an increasing and sustained
amount of staff, money and other resources to organizing?

- How do we involve our rank and file leaders and
members in these and other important questions?

“I believe that there must always be room
within organized labor for legitimate and principled dissent,” Casey
said. “The public discourse initiated by UHW and Sal [Rosselli]
may well be kicking up a lot of dust, but it has also provoked a closer
examination of the direction of our movement.” The letter from Casey
represents an attempt by a union leader outside SEIU to steer the debate
back to the issues, and away from a power conflict between two strong
leaders. “These are not easy questions,” says the organizing
director of one international union. “We’re just getting to
some of the debates we have to have.”

The decisions made by unions often affect workers
far beyond their own members. The U.S. working class made enormous gains
in the 1930s and 40s as the result of the contracts negotiated in the
auto, steel, longshore and electrical industries. The unions involved
also benefited from the fact that workers far beyond their ranks recognized
their own stake in that success, and came out to picketlines, voted for
New Deal candidates, and made other sacrifices to help organize basic
industry – even when they did not share in the union contracts that
followed.

Conversely, when the master agreements in meatpacking
and other industries were destroyed in the early 1980s, and two-tier wage
schemes were imposed, other workers soon faced the same demands. If the
auto industry now abandons company-provided healthcare for retirees, and
labor can’t win a single-payer system, unions far removed from auto
plants will face many more strikes.

SEIU President Andy Stern, promoting the debate
before the break that created the Change to Win federation in 2005, argued
repeatedly that unions make choices that affect all workers. He contrasted,
for instance, the fragmentation of the airline industry among many unions
with the longshore industry, where “one national union deals with
one set of employers, bargaining one contract.”

So it’s not only fair that workers and labor
activists in general discuss the questions highlighted by the internal
conflict in SEIU, since they are affected by them, but their input may
help find answers. “Conflict is built into everything,” Fletcher
says, “including unions. UHW has every right to raise and put on
the table, especially in a convention year, significant differences with
the union’s leadership.”

To have a debate without causing damage, however,
requires some ground rules. Local unions should be able to discuss questions
without fearing retaliation or trusteeship. Debate should discuss ideas
and politics, not personal attacks. An open flow of information about
agreements with employers would not only promote a democratic process,
but would reduce the fear of secret deals.

Labor tries to halt the density decline:

When John Sweeney was elected President of the AFL-CIO in 1995, one of
the greatest criticisms of former President Lane Kirkland was the federation’s
failure to organize. By 1995 AFL-CIO affiliated unions represented less
than 15% of the American workforce, a decline from 35% in the early 1950’s.
Meanwhile the SEIU, under Stern, became the largest national union with
over 1.3 million members. Hundreds of young activist organizers went to
work for it after training at the AFL-CIO Organizing Institute.

But has unionizing new bargaining units successfully
challenged the barriers that divide workers, or reinforced them? Before
the 1960s, Jim Crow was the norm in most craft unions. In industrial unions,
African Americans often worked on the welding and paint lines in most
auto plants, and rarely in tool and die rooms. In service unions, Asian,
Latino and women workers were frequently relegated to stewarding, housekeeping
or bussing tables in hotels and restaurants – the “back of
the house.”

The SEIU international union proposed to separate
nursing home and other ancillary patient care workers, including home
care workers, from traditional acute care hospital workers. That effort
more than any other led to the fight with United Healthcare Workers West.
UHW argues that the separation strengthens divisions, rather than raising
the standards for workers in lower-paid job categories.

Leon Chow, UHW’s San Francisco Home Care
director, says splitting nursing home and home care workers from acute
care hospital workers weakens solidarity and patient care standards. “Hospitals
and acute care facilities are moving more elderly and other patients to
nursing homes and other off-site facilities more quickly,” Chow
says. “Next, they move them home, for home based care. But it is
the same patient. We think they should get the same quality care whether
they are in the acute care facility, in a nursing home or at home. We
want to build solidarity between all the workers who provide health care.
We don’t want acute care workers to say they are better than nursing
home providers and at home providers. Pulling nursing home and home care
workers’ wages and conditions up to the level of hospital workers
will be hard, but will build worker solidarity. We don ‘t want a
short cut that adds more members but which hurts worker solidarity.”

In the janitorial industry, Mike Garcia describes
the way janitors helped security officers achieve the same goal, first
by affiliating an independent union for guards in San Francisco, and negotiating
a much better contract. “That helped us move to Los Angeles and
leverage a newly-forming union and establish standards there,” he
says. Organizing guards also relied on using the existing strength of
organized janitors, who work for the same building owners, and sometimes
even for the same contractors. “We use our membership as a fighting
force to march, picket, demonstrate, and put pressure on non-union buildings.
You need to establish a base in an industry so you can move out from there.”

What price for employer neutrality?

One of the sharpest controversies, however, is the desire by unions to
win the neutrality of employers in the face of these efforts. By the time
the Sweeney administration took over leadership of the AFL-CIO in 1995,
most unions had already concluded that the NLRB election process was an
obstacle to organizing, and were searching for alternatives. Some experimented
with recognition strikes, while others sought to create alternative institutions,
like workers’ rights boards and community elections. Many unions
began exploring ways to put pressure on employers to remain neutral during
organizing efforts, keeping them from deploying their arsenal of captive
audience meetings, bribes and firings. Today, most unions seek a card
check process, in which the employer agrees to recognize the union and
bargain if a majority of workers sign authorization cards.

The difficulty is getting the employer to agree.
In the public sector, political action can elect officials friendly to
unions, and even, in the case of home care workers, create a public employer
able to guarantee wages and conditions and negotiate agreements. In the
private sector unions have used a variety of tactics to pressure employers
into agreement. One strategy is “bargaining to organize,”
– putting a demand for employer neutrality in unorganized units
on the table during contract negotiations. To get agreement, unions often
have to make tradeoffs among bargaining goals.

Part of the debate raging between UHW and the SEIU
International is also about how much a union can give up in exchange for
neutrality, especially with private sector employers. “You have
to pull back the teeth of the employers before workers have a fair chance
to organize the union,” Garcia says. “Neutrality and card-check
agreements are common. In exchange the employer is going to want to understand
how much it’s going to cost them. That’s common in our industry.
It’s just a fact of life.”

One organizing director cautions, however, that
“while we all agree we want to organize industries and industry
master agreements, we also have workers under contract who expect to see
tangible results from unionization and a betterment of their lives. How
far can we go in sacrificing their immediate needs and involvement to
the greater end of building density?”

UHW itself pioneered one such agreement, the Labor-Management
Partnership at Kaiser Permanente hospitals. This broad agreement involves
staffing levels, grievance procedures and organizing rights at unorganized
facilities. Sal Rosselli, UHW president, says “we have always had
relations with employers, but we have approached even cooperation from
the stand-point of strength. We can’t surrender traditional rights,
like the right to picket, strike or bargain.”

Southern California SEIU leader Annelle Grajeda
says “organizing is organizing whether we can do it from the bottom
up or with neutrality. I have seen unionizing change workers’ lives
and if we can get neutrality we should take it and bargain a contract.
SEIU, including UHW, has good contracts because it has industry strength.”

How important is union democracy?

Labor standards and organizing are interdependent.
Workers join unions because they believe they can improve their lives,
and good contracts are a powerful argument for the benefits of getting
organized. But workers do have to make sacrifices to gain organizing rights
and neutrality, or other non-economic goals. In a democratic process,
they often agree to do so. In 2005 and 2006, for instance, members of
UNITE HERE Local 2 were locked out of San Francisco’s luxury hotels
for nine weeks, and then went two years without a contract, in order to
win an agreement that strengthened organizing rights in non-union hotels,
lined their contract negotiations up with those in other cities, and began
to force hotel operators to take down discriminatory bars against hiring
African-Americans. Local 2 members had to agree to give these demands
as high, or even higher, priority than their own wages and benefits.

UHW wants to use its political and bargaining strength
to make a drastic improvement in nursing home wages. Its international
wants to use that strength, together with discussions with national healthcare
corporations, to gain organizing rights for healthcare workers outside
of California. The international wants the local union to subordinate
its local goals to the national one. The local accuses the international
of making deals with healthcare corporations behind its back to gain organizing
rights.

How should unions resolve this problem? One organizing
director says they have to begin by convincing members themselves, rather
than expecting them to simply fall in line behind decisions made by international
staff. “Bargaining for organizing rights depends on how well educated
our members are about the necessity of making some sacrifices in economics
to gain that bargaining goal. Our union has delivered for its members,
and has a certain rank-and-file tradition that’s still alive. People
believe they get what they have because they’re in the union. But
that doesn’t translate automatically into a broader social vision
or organizing impetus. Unless you’re doing constant education and
have a politically conscious leadership, you can’t win their support.”

UNITE-HERE in San Francisco spent years preparing
its members to support organizing in non-union hotels as a condition for
getting high wages and benefits. Local 2 members turned out many times
for mass demonstrations to support organizing, and won bottom-up victories
against two major hotels -- the Parc-55 and the SF Marriott -- before
striking over the organizing issues that forced the lock-out.

How much power should members have over the bargaining
that leads to those agreements? In the last two years SEIU negotiated
agreements with Sodexho, Compass and Aramark, in which the union gained
employer neutrality in certain geographical areas. International union
staff negotiated the accords, and many local officers and rank-and-file
members say they were unaware of the details, or even the existence of
the agreements.

Garcia thought the result was worth it, and didn’t
sacrifice the ability of workers under contract to fight the same companies
to win improvements. “While it’s sometimes flawed and needs
to be improved, [SEIU national strategy] has organized workers in geographic
areas where they would never have had a chance to organize otherwise.
Arizona, for instance, is very important to us because it’s a red
state where SEIU wants to build political power.” Janitors struck
this spring in Los Angeles and northern California to win better wages
from the same group of employers. “You stretch them as far as you
can, and at the same time you’re aggressively and militantly organizing
the workers, leading them in strikes, and building power.”

Rosselli on the other hand feels that democracy
also matters. “Power is being much more concentrated at the top,
with centralized decision making,” he says. “In the California
nursing home industry, SEIU started making top down deals without local
or rank-and-file participation. It’s all centered around a drive
for growth at all costs, without taking into account standards that need
to be raised at the same time, pre-negotiating contracts with corporations
to get organizing rights, while limiting the collective bargaining rights
of workers who are being organized into the union.”

In building services, Garcia says the ultimate
goal is the negotiation of master agreements. For current area-wide negotiations,
“rank-and-file members elect the bargaining committee - members
go out to buildings and get nominating petitions signed.”

To win member support for organizing demands, even
at the expense of some increase in wages and benefits, workers not only
need to know what’s on the table, but to have control over the bargaining
process. When the International Longshore and Warehouse Union was organized
in the wake of the 1934 General Strike, workers won a single contract
with all the giant shipping companies, which covers every port on the
west coast. Local unions elect delegates to a longshore caucus, which
adopts the bargaining program, elects the negotiating committee, and monitors
negotiations. Local unions and members get a fair degree of control, while
at the same time the entire longshore division sits down with the employers
and bargains one contract.

UHW has accused its international union of dissolving
one of the institutions set up for the same purpose. “In 1996 when
Andy Stern was elected we were part of that team,” Rosselli says.
“We amended the Constitution to obligate local unions with a culture
of total autonomy, in which they often undermined each other, to coordinate
with other locals instead that represented workers with common employers,
to collaborate in organizing and collective bargaining. We set up a democratic
process, called Unity Councils, to force that collaboration. In the last
few months the international dissolved the Unity Council at Catholic Healthcare
West just as we were going into bargaining, to try to assume total control
from Washington DC. That’s the fundamental problem we’re now
having.”

The International has proposed National Bargaining
Teams instead of Unity Councils. Unity Councils make decisions by per
capita vote, while Bargaining Teams have one vote per committee member.
Unity Councils include only representatives of local unions, while Bargaining
Teams also include international staff. Bargaining Team members, the chair,
and the lead representative are all appointed by the international president.
Unity Council members are chosen by local unions, and the chair and lead
representative come from the local union with the largest number of workers
with the particular employer.

Class interests vs. union interests

A third area of controversy is the growing debate in unions over broader
political demands, especially in relation to healthcare and immigration
reform. Some unions in the AFL-CIO and Change to Win advocate a long-term
strategy to win structural reforms. They support a single-payer healthcare
system that would eliminate private insurance companies, and immigration
reform that would give undocumented immigrants green cards (permanent
residence visas), and oppose guest worker programs and increased enforcement
and deportations.

Other international unions, including SEIU, have
been willing to compromise on much more limited demands.. In healthcare,
the union threw its support behind a plan devised by California Governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez that would
have required all state residents to purchase private insurance, with
few controls over price and coverage. In Washington, the union supported
a comprehensive immigration reform package that would have provided limited
legalization, along with large new guest worker programs and greatly increased
enforcement.

These have not been disagreements between UHW and
the SEIU International, but between larger groups of unions on each side.
But they affect the ability to organize and grow as much as internal union
structure or bargaining strategy. They are arguments over political strategy,
with one group advocating settling for what Congress might pass immediately,
and the other arguing for a longer-range base-building effort. They are
also arguments over alliances, which in turn affect organizing. Those
who defend the immediate compromises also generally see employers as an
essential ally in winning limited reforms. The unions who want more radical
reform also propose building an alliance at the bottom between unions,
communities of color, consumers and others to get it.

Behind these arguments is an even more basic question.
To what extent should unions represent their own members first and foremost,
and to what extent should they speak for the entire working class? “Samuel
Gompers confused the needs of labor as an institution with the needs of
the working class,” says one organizing director. “Cutting
deals so you can grow your own institution makes politics into a kind
of insider baseball.”

A new direction in labor requires linking unions
with other social and economic justice movements. Winning immigrant rights,
for instance, also means fighting for a real jobs program and a full employment
economy, and for affirmative action that can come to grips with the devastation
in communities of color, especially African American communities. Health
care reform requires a basic alliance between health care providers and
working class consumers.

People far beyond unions will defend labor rights
if they are part of a broader civil rights agenda, and if the labor movement
is willing to go to bat with community organizations for it. To resolve
these questions and grow, unions need not just better strategy and organizing
techniques, and a more accountable structure, but a vision that will inspire
workers on a much larger level than the country has seen since the 1930s.
If all growth depends on direct contact between union organizers and individual
workers, in home visits and house meetings, the scale will always be too
small. Something has to happen on a larger scale among workers generally.
And as much as people need a raise, the promise of one is not enough.

Without speaking directly to workers' desperation
over insecure jobs, home foreclosures and falling income, unions will
never convince millions to organize, and risk the jobs they still have.
Labor needs an outspoken policy that defends the jobs and rights of all
sections of US society. Political calculations in Washington can’t
be the guide to what is possible. Organizing makes possible what was not
possible before. Workers need a movement that fights for what they really
need, not what lobbyists say legislators will accept.

Unions of past decades won the loyalty of working
people when joining one was even more dangerous and illegal than it is
today. The left in labor historically has proposed an alternative social
vision that inspired that loyalty - that society could be organized to
ensure social and economic justice for all people. While some workers
believed that change could be made within the system, and others argued
for replacing it, they were united by the idea that working people could
gain enough political power to end poverty, unemployment, racism, and
discrimination.

“Whenever we’ve seen a real rise in
labor, there’s been a left connected with it,” Fletcher says.
“There needs to be a left, and we need to rebuild it. Workers are
looking for answers, and without them we’ll get further despair
rather than organizing for an alternative.”